You all are playing 3 times here in VA in the next month, how did that work out?

I don’t now, I don’t think about tour markets really… we go through cycles where we play areas a lot, and then we wont come back for a while. But we’ve played Norfolk and Richmond for years. We don’t get to play Charlottesville that much, so its always fun to pop back there. And of course, Wolf Trap, we play almost every summer – and its a great venue and its a fun gig.

Obviously there has been a lot going on with LGBT issues, and marriage equality specifically. Do you feel, as LGBT issues advance, do you feel LGBT music and musicians have advanced? You all have been involved in this cause for some time, but do you feel like the rest of the music industry has caught up?

It’s interesting because there’s still radio and media that hang on to the old model of demographics and market research and i don’t think its going anywhere. And these systems are inherently homophobic still. It distills everything to these numbers and demographics and there is still so much homophobia in our society, even though we’ve made all these advancements. Anybody that has any kind of otherness to them, if they are a minority, or if they are gay, anything, gets sort of put in this category of otherness and does not get promoted the same way, to be honest.

I think, in the old model, there’s still a lot of that going on, but the new model, with the internet and online radio and shows that try and bring attention to bands that aren’t looked at as much, there’s a new set of gatekeepers, if you will. Both of these things are going on simultaneously right now. Just like our country, were you can have a president that is pro-gay rights, but then you can still have towns and parts of the US that have very backward laws and haven’t evolved yet, figured it out, or gotten brave enough. It can be polarizing when you’re in the middle of a movement, and things are kind of changing rapidly. It can be very polarizing when people aren’t very comfortable with change and they react as such.

In music, yea know, I still have young musician friends that are afraid to come out, and so that really hasn’t changed. And they come out in their personal lives, and its not like the heaviness that existed in the 80′s when we thought we would all lose our familes. That still happens, yea know? But the focus they are having now is more pragmatic and business focused. “I don’t want to be put in a niche, I wanna be seen for my music and not my gayness” and thats kind of the conversation that’s always going on.

Have a listen below to their most recent single, Making Promises, released back in 2011: